The Blue and White Group
Eagleson graduated in law from the University of Toronto and soon became a prominent lawyer in Toronto. He first became involved with hockey as an advisor to Bob Pulford, a player with the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was quickly realized that any attempt to create a union would be easier to achieve with Leafs players as his base of power. That led to other members of the Leafs becoming clients, most notably defenceman Carl Brewer, who hired Eagleson as his agent.
Eagleson formed the Blue and White Group, a group of friends he had known from the Maple Leafs, including Brewer, Pulford, Bobby Baun and Billy Harris, along with a car dealer, a jeweller, and three other lawyers. Eagleson's motive was to educate these players about investments, and use their funds more intelligently. Pulford, Brewer and Harris eventually earned university degrees after their playing careers. Two members of the Blue and White Group, Pulford and Baun, were the first two presidents of the NHLPA.
The Leafs' acquisition of Andy Bathgate was advantageous to Eagleson. A friendship was forged in Toronto which followed Bathgate to Detroit, where Eagleson started to talk to Red Wings players about the concept of a union.
Read more about this topic: Alan Eagleson
Famous quotes containing the words blue, white and/or group:
“They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon a blue guitar.””
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
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“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)